PV by Eileen Myles

Some old drunk who’d been to France recently died, left his collection of Isherwood, John O’Hara, tobacco-stained, grungy with tattered invites hanging out. I come wagging out of the train station at 59th & nearly scream, Just the books I need!

I take my own sense of abundance down into the subway, the F, Second Ave., the bodies strewn, the stink of human shit the ungodly lights, standing, waiting in the heat

The mother won’t repeat for the child. If you didn’t get it the first time . . .

Who is that Irish novelist he says, the one we see in meetings in East Hampton

the train arrives & I hop

on that lesbian poet, the one we always see around 3:30 in Kiev, having a very late lunch I guess.

We whiz uptown to get help. We whiz back down. This is an old fashioned phone call, Do you have 10 bucks, All saints’ day 1989.

I slept with her last night, first time since August, she’s moving so the smells of her neighbor’s pot won’t waft insidiously into her bedroom anymore, Jan with his new electric piano, Jan the monkey-faced pot dealer who teaches tai chi.

I went to see 17 art shows on Saturday. 17. That’s not a lot. Saw Tim in the hospital on Sun- day. Thin Tim. We know he’ll come out. He doesn’t want to be everyone’s friend Tim who has AIDS so we won’t let him be that. We won’t. We charged around in our dungarees watching the century approach. Another one, nicer than this, young again, full of conviction, naïveté, covered with hair and sunlight, brim- ming with time, a wave of invention . . .

I take my sense of abundance into the subway & what do I see? People bending reading swaying, torn posters waving in a song of sickening movement. Why don’t they think we know about rice, racing . . . handsome woman fiddling with her bag. We’re the same people who met in a disaster, but nothing hap- pened here. You can’t call it joy this somnolence, licking our lips with our earphones on. The poet got off in the yellowing light, the rising tile, then Lexington Ave. Have you gone here, did you go there everyone wants to know. & there’s the EXIT. Absolutely now I’m going & the buildings are growing before my eyes.